This month the feature is The Art of Manliness. I have subscribed to the AoM newsletter for quite a few years, and have enjoyed the advice, tutorials, history lessons, reviews, and just general information about how to be a better, more complete, confident and stronger man.
The
“about” page summarizes the scope of this excellent site better
than anything I could write: “The mission of AoM is to get men not
only reading and listening to our content, but ultimately
implementing what they learn into their lives; through our articles,
podcasts, books, and programs, AoM aims to help men, as Theodore
Roosevelt put it, “Get action.” We seek to help men grow up well,
reach their potential, become better friends, mentors, husbands,
fathers, and citizens, and live a life of eudamonia
— skill, flourishing, excellence, and virtue.”
Once
a month I will share a recipe, a post about cooking or one about
gardening. On a previous blog I posted around 30 of our family’s
favorite recipes, so they would be archived and available for use. I
won’t repeat those recipes on this blog, so here
is a link to them if you are interested.
For this month I want to share a cooking tip I learned a few years back about homemade soup. I imagine most of you already know this, but for the few that might not it can really make a difference. After your homemade soup is fully cooked choose a can of cream soup that most closely parallels the type or flavor of your soup. Add the cream soup to a blender, throw in some shredded or cubed cheese and then fill the remainder with ladles of the soup you have just cooked. Blend it and then pour the contents into your homemade soup to make a thicker, cheesy version. I have also added a leftover diced baked potato or a package of instant potatoes to the blender ingredients.
Once
a month I will highlight a piece of art I have created and posted on
my Fine Art America site. This one is titled Bela,
from the Faces and Beings Collection. It is chalk pastel, oil pastel
and pencil on paper.
Over
the winter one of the books I read was The Singing Creek Where The
Willows Grow, The Rediscovered Diary of Opal Whiteley by Benjamin
Hoff. Opal was a naturalist, teacher, writer, lecturer and traveler
born in 1897 in Washington, who grew up in Oregon. She kept a diary
for a number of years starting as a child and, for reasons well
explained in the introduction of the book, she was eventually
discredited as a fraud and slowly descended into fantasy and mental
illness, spending the last 44 years of her life in a psychiatric
hospital in England. The author makes a very well presented and
convincing case that the hoax Opal was accused of was created and
relentlessly pushed by the press and her skeptics. The bulk of the
book is a segment of one of her earliest diaries, in which Opal as a
charming, observant little girl describes her life among the trees
and animals, family and neighbors. She endures, shrugs off and even
in a way embraces various hardships and sad episodes that she records
in her diary. Her numerous pets have long, elaborate names. She
attempts to assist her mother around the house in what she considers
a logical, helpful way that usually ends in disaster. But the crux of
the diary, what Opal returns to again and again, is her love of
nature. It talks to her, guides her, is all encompassing; it loves
her and she returns the love. This six year old child prodigy
describes her surroundings in a magical way, drawing you into her
world. Her last line in the diary section of the book: “The great
pine tree is saying a poem, and there is a song in the tree-tops.”
Get a copy and enjoy, and the next time you are in the woods listen
for the poems and songs.
With a previous blog (you can check it out here) I ran a series called the Weekly Roundup, which would link to sites I thought were useful, interesting, or both. I enjoyed sharing what I found so I am going to revive the series on this blog, but not weekly for now. Welcome to The Roundup.
Check
out Family Handyman for
great how to tips, do it yourself projects, videos and much more.
Make sure to subscribe to their free newsletters while you are there.
Project
Gutenberg “offers over 58,000 free eBooks. Choose among
free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You
will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older
works for which U.S. copyright has expired.”
The
Senior List states “ Older
adults and caregivers turn to our experts for objective guidance —
from care alternatives to the best senior products.” Make sure to
check out the Senior Discounts section. If like me you don’t qualify,
share the site with parents or grandparents.
Theodore
Dalrymple has been a regular read and a favorite of mine for several
years now. You can read some of his essays and learn more about him
here
and here.
A few of the books we have collected over the years in anticipation of country living
Shelly
comes from a country and small town beginning, and I am a born and
bred city boy. When we bought our house in the city we settled in and
raised our two kids, experiencing school events, sports, plays,
scouts, friends and neighbors, family and work. Typical lives, with
the same ups and downs as everyone else. Shelly was able to work from
home for a few years and I worked for the same company downtown for
over 18 years. The country dream came over us slowly. We gardened in
our small plot under the large oak tree next to the garage, and
canned and froze what we grew. We joined with some family and bought
beef several times from a locker to store in our upright freezer. We
built up and maintained a large pantry in the basement, including
water. We cooked from scratch, and planted beautiful perennials
around our yard. Over the years we amassed every kind of yard, garden
and power tools we could use, and some we couldn’t, just in case.
Every Sunday afternoon, weather permitting, we took the kids out to a
park. Several times a year we would camp, and for a few years we
would take a family vacation up north or head west. We would marvel
at the wide open spaces, and the big sky at night. I kept collecting
and reading homesteading, gardening, wildlife and how to books, and
Shelly and I began to talk more and more about getting out of the
city. Dreaming turned to yearning. Now that it has happened not
everything is exactly what we expected (last winter especially) but
we feel right at home here in the country.
The main critter on our acreage, our dog Marley, looking off the back porch
Maybe
the most ubiquitous animals we have encountered on the acreage are
mice. They nested in all of the soft camping equipment we stored in
the back shed over the winter (tents, sleeping bags, blankets,
pillows) and ruined some of it with their shredding, urine and feces.
There seem to be two distinct types here based on their coats. One is
gray and black and and the other tan and brown and larger in size.
Mousetraps work well on both.
Recently I noticed a garter snake coiled between the side of the house and a downspout. I knocked it to the ground and our dog Marley picked it up in her mouth and shook it then began pawing at it. The snake stopped moving and soon Marley was walking unsteady and dripping saliva from her mouth. Shelly did what everyone does these days and whipped out her smart phone. What she found was that the dog was having an allergic reaction to either the snakes skin or its venom, or both. We forced a antihistamine down Marley’s throat and soon she was fine. When we looked for the snake it was gone.
Over
the winter we had a pair of rabbits staying in the machine shed and
foraging around the acreage. One day I walked up the driveway to the
mailbox and there was one of them dead, with most of its insides now
on the outside. Only a week later the surviving rabbit had been
joined by another, and we had a pair again.
What
got the rabbit probably was either the bald eagle or the chicken hawk
we had seen perched on telephone poles or fence posts, or flying
overhead. The chicken hawk comes and goes but I am guessing the bald
eagle was only hunting in our area until the river thawed, because I
have not seen it for a few months.
Marley
alerted us one night to either a huge raccoon or a groundhog that she
had chased up one of our light poles. By the time I had grabbed a
rifle the dog had excitedly run off in another direction and the
animal was gone from the pole.
One
night in late autumn a thick fog had reduced visibility to around 30
feet. Two packs of coyotes, one to the south and the other southeast,
began howling and yipping back and forth, getting louder as they both
approached the house. I was standing on the back porch listening and
soon they were close enough I thought they would appear through the
fog. The tension I felt was enough that I had backed up to the door,
ready to rush in, and I had already put Marley in the house.
Curiosity kept me there, waiting for something to happen. It went
silent, the fog drifting in the slight wind. Nothing, as if they had
disappeared. Minutes went by, and not another sound from them. They
were gone.
Some of our white willow trees leafing out this spring
Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Sitting Bull
Spring is the time of plans and projects. Leo Tolstoy
I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older. Virginia Woolf
On
the first day of spring I saw the first two robins of the year on our
acreage. Even though the ground was still frozen in many places, they
were patiently pecking around in the ground looking for worms and
grubs. The snow drifts were still large, but shrinking daily. The
roads were sloppy and rutted, but passable if one took it slow where
it was not too bad and fast through the soft parts. We began to see
flocks of geese flying over from the south. (A favorite joke of mine
when the kids were little: Have you ever wondered why one end of the
V is longer than the other? There are more birds on that side.) The
bird feeders have more activity around them, mostly with sparrows and
finches, but I have noticed some nuthatches, grackles and mourning
doves around us. The miscellaneous trees and shrubs almost all have
huge buds but have not quite opened yet. The white willow trees that
surround the acreage were the last to loose their leaves in autumn
but the first to leaf out this spring. The fly’s and bees are slow
moving on the cooler days but speed up on the warmer ones, and a
couple of days ago I saw my first butterfly this year.
For every person who has ever lived there has come, at last, a spring he will never see. Glory then in the springs that are yours. Pam Brown
Lake Jacobi on the rise. The view from our driveway looking south west.
As
March wore on little by little it began to warm. The ice on the
rivers and streams began to break up, and slowly the snow was
melting. A cold snap would stop the thaw, but only for a day or two.
Even though the snow was gone from the roof of the machine shed it
dripped inside for two weeks from the melting snow that the wind had
packed into the rafters. As the thaw continued a pond began to form
in the lowest part of our front yard and the adjacent field. In a few
days it had almost reached the top of our mounded driveway, which was
all that was keeping it from flooding our house. Here was yet another
situation caused by the weather that we could do nothing about, only
watch develop. Bare patches of soil were appearing in the fields in
the immediate area around the pond, which was hopefully a sign the
snow melt had peaked and maybe the ground was thawing enough to
absorb some of it. Finally the water level of the pond (nicknamed
Lake Jacobi by Shelly) began to recede and what had been a cause of
concern became a place of joy as our dog retrieved thrown sticks from
the shrinking pond. The buds on the trees were growing and the days
were getting longer. After that seemingly never ending, very harsh
winter spring was finally almost here.
We were already accustomed to keeping our eyes on the weather reports but this year they were checked several times daily. The John Deere 420 had been doing a great job of throwing snow, but there had been so much of it the thrower could barely heave it over the piles and drifts that now lined our driveway and surrounded our house and buildings. We kept two 5 gallon gas cans full and several more 1 gallon cans on hand just in case. By early March we were thinking there could not be too much more snow left to come when the National Weather Service website read “Blizzard”. In all the years I had used the site I could not recall ever seeing a blizzard warning, and if none of these previous storms were blizzard worthy I figured we had something coming at us to really worry about. Stocked up on gas and food, we could do nothing but wait for it to arrive. It hit with a fury of almost 50 mph winds that did not seem to weaken during the entire storm. The snow was a horizontal white blur that blocked the view of anything around us that was more than a few feet from the house. The sound was a constant whistling howl, and the gusts seemed to make the house shudder. Neither one of us slept well as it raged on through the night. The next day was relatively calm, and we began to dig out. Shelly was on the 420 while I worked in front using a shovel to knock the snow down down so that the thrower could reach it. The drifts in our driveway ranged from 1 to 5 feet high. I would dig in with the shovel, step out of the way so she could throw that with the tractor, then repeat. For 9 hours. And that is how we spent our 2019 wedding anniversary.
Off The Back Porch 